I'd say IBM is a company you can be sure it'll get the job done, but you can't be sure about how. They will want to sell you 10 times more hardware than you need and they'll develop one of these terribly bloated scalable enterprise solutions to make managers happy with all the buzzwords (web 2.0, scalable, business, professional enterprise solution, AJAX, XML, XSL, J2EE, etc.) and justify the hardware.
I.e. if you IBM to write a maze-solving program which displays the labyrinth and solves it, they'll sell you one of their dual-processor servers (at the very least) with a professional Java enterprise scalable solution which runs over an Xbox-sized J2EE application server, but it's only used to read an XML file of parameters, transform it into another XML file with XSLT, finally read the parameters from there, then generate a block of JavaScript to send the client (in an XHTML 1.1 web page, of course). This JavaScript block connects back to the server using XmlHttpRequest to obtain the rest of the data, and draws the maze by asking the server for SVG files (generated on the fly). The application will come with a professional enterprise scalable log, audit, trace, debug and profile utilities which generate more XML so you can load it in your Business Intelligence application (which they offer to sell you). They'll take a couple of months to develop and deploy the application.
Then if you ask WAHa or any other real programmer for it, in 15 minutes you'll get a single-file, simple stdout-based script that does the job and runs in your abacus.